Enterprise IT Context for the CTO

Bob Gourley

Bob Gourley, former CTO of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), is Founder and CTO of Crucial Point LLC, a technology research and advisory firm providing fact based technology reviews in support of venture capital, private equity and emerging technology firms. He has extensive industry experience in intelligence and security and was awarded an intelligence community meritorious achievement award by AFCEA in 2008, and has also been recognized as an Infoworld Top 25 CTO and as one of the most fascinating communicators in Government IT by GovFresh.

By Michael Johnson
CTOvision is a proud media sponsor of the 2015 STEM Symposium, which will be held on March 7th at the Nysmith School in Herndon, Va from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. This year's theme... The Parent Factor: How to Engage your Kids in STEM. There are many exciting activities fo...

By Bob Gourley
The O'Reilly Software Architecture Conference is a new event designed to provide the in-depth professional training that software architects and people working on software architecture need to support the success of their businesses. Happening March 16-19 in Boston, it c...

By Bob Gourley
I just got off the phone with Adam Vincent of ThreatConnect. What a great leader and technologist. I have watched as he and a team of very smart, mission focused technologists turned his company into a provider of capabilities in demand by a growing number of Fortune 500...

By Katie Kennedy
CTOvision's Bob Gourley is the keynote speaker at the event: "Best of Breed: How to Achieve ABAC Today!" The event is on March 24 at the Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. from 7:30 am to 1:45 pm. Explore how to achieve Attribute Based Access Control (ABAC) from the best o...

By Katie Kennedy
68-year-old Allen Zderad lost his career as a chemist due to a degenerative eye disease. This week he was able to see again with a "bionic eye" implant. [The] “bionic eye” implant, [is] a chip with electrodes implanted in [Zderad's] retina that interacts with a camera ...

By May Gourley
Blending data can be a slow and painful process, as it requires many different tools to gather the data from many different sources, build and publish the analytic models, and to bring it to the attention of the people who can use it to make the big decisions. Alteryx ha...

VentureBeat and GigaOm are both reporting that Pivotal will be announcing some big shifts in their Hadoop and other related offerings (recall that Pivotal is the firm spun off from EMC and VMware and has GE as a major investor).
VentureBeat first announced that Pivotal will be ditch...

By Bob Gourley
Barracuda, ReversingLabs, Telefonica and Zscaler have joined the Cyber Threat Alliance to help drive a coordinated industry effort against cyber adversaries through deep collaboration on threat intelligence and sharing of indicators of compromise. The following is from a...

By Bob Gourley
The Cyber Threat is a book published to succinctly articulate the nature of the cyber threat in ways designed to help business leaders come to terms with the nature of this phenomenon. The book is available on Amazon (and is free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers). The bo...

By Bob Gourley
If you are an enterprise technologist working with infrastructure solutions, or a statistician or one of those famed data scientists, you have probably already discovered who is responsible for your career advancement and education... You are. Others might help, but you...

By Katie Kennedy
The Apple Watch has a new competitor, the Pebble smartwatch. The first part of Pebble’s next move unsurprisingly centers around the new watch. Called Pebble Time, it’s about what you’d expect a third-generation Pebble to be. It's thinner and lighter than Pebble’s earli...

By Bob Gourley
Editor's note: It has been a real pleasure to be able to work with Matt Southmayd at Cognitio. The press release below captures some of what he brings to our organization, our clients and the business community. - bg Matt Southmayd Named Vice President Commercial Markets...

By Shannon Perry
Sometimes big threats to consumers’ digital security and privacy come in the form of pre-installed programs, software built into consumer products that creates vulnerabilities that hackers can exploit. Last week, Reuters reported that the Department of Homeland Securit...

By Bob Gourley
Data science history was made on 19 Feb 2015. For the first time in the history of Hadoop World, the President of the United States gave a keynote. Dwell on that for a bit. This is huge. No matter what your politics is, you really have to agree, this is huge. After the P...

By ChrisScott
If you are in a company that seeks to serve the Department of Defense (DoD) with technology or services you absolutely need to track the mission needs of the department. If you don't you will have a very hard time expressing to decision-makers why they should consider you...

By May Gourley
Informatica provides data integration software. Their products help with data integration, replication, virtualization, masking, and quality. Their flagship product is Vibe, a virtual data machine which is an "embeddable data management engine that powers Informatica's I...

By Bob Gourley
Editor's note: I have had the opportunity to interact with Wout Brusselaers and Brian Dolan of Qurius and regard them as highly accomplished big data architects with special capabilities in natural language processing and deep learning. I asked them to provide an update ...

By Bob Gourley
Everyone in the big data movement knows of DJ Patil. What you might not know about him is that he is one of many technologists who took government experience and service into the private sector to help contribute there. Yep, while everyone else, including Wired, is sayin...

By Nate Fick
Editor's note: Nate Fick is the CEO of Endgame where we first saw this piece. We asked him to share these thoughts with you here. - bg The Obama Administration deserves credit for putting together the first-ever White House summit on cybersecurity on Friday and – contrary ...

By Charles Hall
Hortonworks' Hadoop Data Platform (HDP) is now a supported feature on Google Cloud. This new feature will allow dynamic provisioning of HDP clusters on the Google Cloud Platform, providing scalability for enterprise-wide solutions employing HDP, as well as providing a ...

By Katie Kennedy
Have you ever wanted the ability to zoom in on things with just a wink of your right eye? Now there is such a technology, thanks to Swedish optics researcher Eric Tremblay. The lenses work by incorporating a very thin reflective telescope inside a 1.55mm thick contact ...

By Shannon Perry
For many professionals, celebrities, and enterprises, Twitter is a branding boon. Instantly connecting with thousands or even millions of followers – providing up-to-the-minute information about sales, promotions, activities, or special events – presents a world of opp...

By Bob Gourley
There are threats to your business and mission needs. Tracking them can give you insights that drive your decisions. Our daily Threat Brief is designed to give you insights into threats you need to know in an easily digestible format. Modeled after the President's Daily ...

By ChrisScott
The Honorable Robert O. Work, Deputy Secretary of Defense spoke at AFCEA WEST in San Diego on 10 February. This is the largest Navy/USMC forum and was well attended by key leaders this year. Secretary Work was convincing in his condemnation of sequestration, and how it wi...

It is widely known that the National Security Agency houses an impressive cyber force with the capacity to bypass the digital defenses of private individuals, enterprises, and even foreign governments – a force powerful enough to draw criticism from the American public and American all...

By Bob Gourley
Pentaho has just announced version 5.3 of their open data platform including new features which will be of high interest to any enterprise with data (all enterprises!). From their press release: Pentaho to Deliver On Demand Big Data Analytics at Scale on Amazon Web Servi...

By Michael Johnson
After weeks of rumors and pontification by pundits (including us here at: Pivotal CEO Hints At Big Shift In Their Hadoop Offerings) today Pivotal made their big announcement, which included a big move to a tighter relationship with Hortonworks. ZDNet was the first to...

By Bob Gourley
Cognitio co-founder and CEO Roger Hockenberry was featured in a special BizTechReports piece which focused on Cognitio's capabilities in cyber threat reduction. The following is an excerpt: When it comes to cybersecurity, what you don’t know about the nature and sophisti...

By Bob Gourley
Palo Alto Networks has just announced a new public sector advisory council and the addition of Ryan Gillis to the Palo Alto Networks team as Vice President of Government Affairs and Policy. Additionally, Palo Alto Networks CEO has been appointed to the President's NSTAC....

By Matt Southmayd
Cybersecurity is one of the most important issues facing organizations today. It is so important that President Obama addressed it 20 January during his State of the Union address. The President talked about the urgent need to ensure that "no foreign nation, no hacker...

By Bob Gourley
Lets start with some good news: Sometimes problems can only be solved after there is widespread situational awareness, and now that cyber security and cyber threats are going mainstream, more and more people are being made aware of how serious this threat of stolen healt...

By Katie Kennedy
Have you ever wanted a physical keyboard on your iPad? I know I have... Now there is one! Apple’s touch-based devices have changed the way we interact with computers entirely, but that hasn’t stopped users from occasionally thinking wistfully of the days when physical ...

By Bob Gourley
At this link you can save 20% off registration for Strata + Hadoop World London 2015 Immerse yourself in the world of big data at Strata + Hadoop World. Explore solutions to your most challenging problems, connect with the brightest minds in data, find out what’s new in ...

By May Gourley
The products that Tableau Software have created are an ingenious way of understanding data and also of collaborating with colleagues around the world. They do it with a simple "drag-and-drop" method of visualizing and interacting with data. Tableau states that any person...

By May Gourley
First announced at both Revolution Analytics' and Microsoft's blogs, on 23 Jan 2015, the purchase of Revolution Analytics by Microsoft was done in order to help customers "find big data value with advanced statistical analysis." Revolution Analytics has been offering sup...

Editor's note: We have tracked Pentaho for years and have observed first hand the power of their open approaches to an end to end framework for helping organizations make the most of their data holdings. Congrats to the entire team at Pentaho for this, you created something of tremendo...

By Bob Gourley
The fine print offered by Samsung regarding their new Smart TV is something you need to dwell on. Not only does the TV recognize your voice, but it will record your conversations even when you do not know you are being listened to. Additionally, this information will be ...